Yeah sure. Tell me how necessary the catholic church is. Had to put up with all manner of evils they did. Couldn't live without them, once upon a time.
Super necessary stuff, this: https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/former-perth-police-officer-claims-wa-s-force-was-rife-with-racism-full-of-hatred-20200605-p54zwx.html

There's bad ones, there's the ones that see the bad ones and stay silent, there's the good ones, and there's the good ones that speak up and get ostracised out of the job.
Of the good ones that are left, who aren't prejudiced pieces of shit, they're still the ones enforcing shitty laws, and eg arresting people for helping to feed the homeless. Or just following orders from higher ups.
So of the good ones that're left, that has to take in them as being good in general, but not in some scenarios because of their lack of training and policies.
Of the police that were marching in upstate New York, when the old guy was pushed over and cracked his head open: the guy pushing him is a bad cop, and the one telling the person who stopped to see if he was ok to leave him is a bad cop, but which of the others were good and bad and inbetween?
So are you just reporting on what the Guardian said, or are you saying your personal opinion too?

So your plan is to fire all the police and ask them to reapply for their jobs with a lot more stringent policies in place on who they hire?
Sounds like a massive police budget win there, but could equally be described as defunding the police.

Defunding the police isn't about paying individual police less. It's about having less police, and more people who are better suited to some of the tasks that the police are asked to do. It's about decentralising power, because centralised power seems to get misused - or attract people who like to misuse it.
Melbourne about to get another safe injecting site could be seen as a type of defunding the police, not that it'd ever be sold that way, because DAndrews and VicPol seem pretty tight.
Also, I don't think this is a status quo is perfect situation, so an argument against defunding the police is to increase their funding. I mean I guess that's one way to get rid of unemployment, doubling or tripling the police force, but for what purpose?

There's different levels of defunding the police. At the lighter end, it's demilitarising them, which is a bigger deal in the US but still wouldn't be without impact here.
At the deeper end, it'd be putting more funding into better trained first responders, eg maybe not having armed police attend people having a bad mental health day, but sending actual mental health specialists.
Which I'm sure is laid out in that article.
But either way, if defunding the police is bad, then giving them more funding is good, and... they don't seem to h ave a good history of using extra funding for great outcomes.

I find it frustrating, I guess, in the same way that it can be seen as ok for this big nihilistic push born out of frustration at the system, to say 'fuck it, lets elect Trump', but it can be seen as absolutely not ok for that same frustrated outlook, at a broken system failing over and over again, to decide to stop waiting for the system to one day finally work.
Shit is fucked up at a systems level, and I think most of the real drama is coming from people disagreeing on how to fix it, or if it even needs fixing, let alone evolution/revolution talk.
KPIs are a great way for the boss to make sure the staff are all doing things, but it's odd how easy it is for the KPI to become more important than the work it's meant to represent. I've seen this in a bunch of jobs, but the stakes are pretty meaningless vs putting them onto police and having performance bonuses based on how much you can, basically, go and provoke people into doing something you can justify an arrest over. It's funny how often police will be sent to work in areas with people of low socioeconomic status, basically being made to turn a blind eye to people earning enough to be classed as donors.
Regulatory capture is shit no matter what form it takes, or who is in power and allows it. And the US, moreso than here, has a weird history of mixing up a lot of money to throw around for pet political projects, with a history of some pretty fucked up inappropriate moralising.
Anyway, starting to see some media sources being a bit more honest about the proportion of protests that are peaceful vs those that are violent on both sides, which is heartening if a few weeks too late.